circular bash pipes

Today I had the terrible idea of a circular bash pipe. Turns out, you can do this easily with fifos. Here's a simple yes-like program done with a circular pipe, to demonstrate:

echo "y" | cat - fifo | tee fifo

You may now return to your regularly scheduled sanity.

save a stream with mplayer

Neat little trick I learned today. If you have a stream that mplayer can play and you want to save it to a file for later use, this will do the trick:

mplayer "some_stream" -ao pcm:file=file.wav

that produces a raw WAV file, which you can then convert to the format of your preference with other tools like ffmpeg.

DAAP and Exaile: better together

I've been working on a DAAP plugin for Exaile for a while now, and it is finally finished (I hope :P). For those of you unfamiliar with DAAP, it is the method used by iTunes to allow playing of other people's music over a network. The plugin is available in Exaile's SVN as of revision 2411, and will also be available in Exaile 0.2.10 and later releases.

Screenshots:

Look, remote music!


Playing music from a share.


To run the plugin, you will need to have python-daap and python-avahi installed. For Ubuntu users, python-daap packages, along with builds of Exaile SVN, are available in my exaile-svn repo.

Enjoy!